A compass that points to the presence of God
Nicolas Herman saw something at the age of 18 that changed his life.” In winter, seeing a tree bare of its leaves, and considering that within a little time, the leaves would come anew, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the providence and power of God, which has never been effaced from his soul.”
What he saw was not out of the ordinary, but its effect was. The incident must have been in the 1620s. Herman was an engaging character, though he described himself in his rough and ready way as “a great awkward fellow who broke everything”. He was wounded in the foot during the Thirty Years’ War. In 1640, he entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Paris, in the Rue de Vaugirard, I think, at the east end, opposite the Bagelstein shop today.
As a lay brother, under a new name of Brother Lawrence, his task was not to sing in the choir but to work in the kitchen. After his death in 1691, a collection of conversations with him were published under the title The
Practice of the Presence of God (from which the quotation above is taken). This is where the tree comes in. I’d been thinking about it because I’d been trying to make out the meaning of the Collect prayer we said in church last week.
This Collect asked that we “may experience as he promised” Christ’s “abiding presence among us”. I am suspicious of experiences as the goals or criteria of religion. It was his presence that Jesus promised, not our experience of it. Yet the prayer couldn’t be asking for his presence, since that was guaranteed by his promise. It was puzzling.
The providence and power of God were not directly to be sensed when Herman looked at that tree. Some may think his was a poetic or mystical experience, as happened to Wordsworth or Blake. I think, though, that it must have been consequent on faith.
Faith is not belief based on
an absence of evidence but belief based on the testimony of someone reliable: God. As a virtue it cannot be worked up, like the ability to play the piano, but is a gift.
Nicolas Herman, or Brother Lawrence, was lucky that his insight into the providence of God never left him. But he must have been right in linking providence to the practice of the presence of God.
This was something that the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe concluded, in one of her papers collected in Faith in a Hard Ground. As I mentioned here in 2008, if we keep in mind that God sees and hears us, such a practice must, as Anscombe says, be “related to the divine ruling of the world”. An earthly parallel would be the state of mind of soldiers whose supreme commander was constantly aware of what they do. The important difference is that this would instill an attitude that one “mustn’t be caught” disobeying. “In the heavenly case, it would (to put it briefly) hang together with our adjustment as, so to speak, compass needles pointing towards God or away from God.”
This links up with a prayer Brother Lawence would say before a busy session in the kitchen: “I must now, in obedience to thy commands, apply my mind to these outward things, I beseech thee to grant me the grace to continue in thy presence.”
This makes the practice of the presence of God more intention than attention. Brother Lawence rejoiced to pick up a piece of straw for the love of God. Intention is shown by the answer we readily give to the question, “What are you doing?” Whether we’re putting a toddler in a buggy or going down an escalator, the answer can be, “Loving God.”